Tag Archives: Welcome

We’d like to give a warm welcome to our latest recruit Alan, our new Invasive Non-Native Species Officer!

We’ve stolen Alan from Scotland where he was working on Argyll’s three National Nature Reserves for Scottish Natural Heritage. Before this Alan was in Cape Town, South Africa, controlling invasive species in the metropolitan area so he has a wealth of experience.

Alan is running an invasive species project on the River Wandle as part of the Living Wandle Landscape Partnership. The project aims to map invasive species along the Wandle corridor and set up management plans and volunteer teams to work towards eradication.

Alan will be tackling a wide variety of invasive non-native species including some well-known faces such as Himalayan balsam, Japanese knotweed and giant hogweed.

To get started, Alan has been taking a refresher in Pesticide Application along with Polly our Volunteer Officer. Here is our invasive species ghost busting team…

We are delighted to welcome Toby Hull as our newest Catchment Project Officer!

Toby has a background in delivering physical river improvement projects and is as at home in the river as he is on dry land. Which is just as well as we’ve thrown him in at the deep end – he’s already helped design new river restoration projects, install eel easements and remove part of a weir, not to mention providing invaluable assistance in the recent pollution incident.

Over the past few months, we’ve been watching closely as our friends over at the Wandle Piscators created one of the very first fishing club websites completely based on blogging software.

We reckoned they were probably onto something with this dyamic, interactive new Web 2.0 format, but we thought we’d wait and see.

Now, we’ve taken the plunge ourselves.

With our new Development Officer on board, and consultation work beginning on the Wandle’s first ever Community Catchment Plan, early 2009 seemed the best possible time to relaunch ourselves online with (what we think is still) one of the world’s first totally blog-based charity websites.

In the last couple of weeks, as you’ll discover, we’ve been working hard to move all our old content over to this exciting new system.

Dig deep enough and you’ll still find all those old cleanup reports in their full muddy glory… every one of ’em. But there’s a lot of interesting new stuff too…

Firstly, on the front page of this site, Bella and our team of Trustees will be reporting regularly from the front line of conservation news and work on the Wandle – and anywhere else that’s relevant and grabs our interest.

Secondly, and most importantly, you and all our readers will be able to comment on what we say, and discuss it with us right here on screen.

All you need to do is add your thoughts below the post that’s inspired you to comment, and you’re away!

(To keep spam and other nasties to a minimum, we’re sorry that all comments will need to approved by one of the team before they appear “live” on the site, but we’ll do our very best to get to them as soon as possible. And if you’ve got a criticism of any kind, we’ll promise not to shy away, but try to answer it in public).

We hope you’ll find this direct-feedback system much more user-friendly than the forum on our old site.

In fact, it’s one of the main reasons we chose this new format for wandletrust.org – to help make two-way conversations with our supporters, project partners and other Living Wandle stakeholders as easy as possible. It’s what the whole charity world should be aiming at, and we hope you’ll like it too.

Of course you can still get in touch with us by email, phone or post: just click here for all our contact details. And you can also use the “Stay in touch” box on the left of this page to sign up for our monthly cleanup emails.

So why not tell us what you think of our new format? Take a look around today, and let us know!